A gesture recognition apparatus according to a conventional technique recognizes a movement of a user (hereinafter referred to as a gesture operation) in a picture taken by a camera, by performing contour extraction, object extraction, shape change recognition, and position detection, and controls a device based on the result of the recognition (for example, see PTL 1). FIG. 9 is a block diagram showing a functional configuration of a conventional gesture recognition apparatus disclosed in PTL 1.
A screen 401 in FIG. 9 shows a variety of information or a graphical user interface (GUI) which reflects a result of a gesture operation. A camera 402 takes pictures of a gesture operation of a user. A frame memory 411 stores the pictures of the user taken by the camera 402. A movement recognition unit 412 reads the pictures from the frame memory 411 on a regular basis and recognizes a gesture operation by performing contour extraction, object extraction, shape change recognition, and position detection on the read pictures. A display control unit 413 and an icon generation unit 414 generate a GUI which reflects the result of the gesture operation by the movement recognition unit 412 and displays the GUI on the screen 401.